In this series, I’m going to discuss the question, what are Austen’s novels about? They are about more than romance and marriage, of course, although many people enjoy them for the love stories. What gives them their universal, timeless appeal? And are we really supposed to like Fanny Price more than Mary Crawford?
    In an earlier post, I mentioned that I don't think her novels are about political or social themes. Jane Austen is a moralist who critiqued the world around her, but she's not a revolutionary.   
​   The first example I’m going to look at in depth involves Dr. Helena Kelly's take on the hidden meaning of the militia in Pride and Prejudice.
   According to Dr. Kelly, when the militia marches into town, the reader should be feeling an uncomfortable tingle up the back of his neck.
   "The militias aren’t in the novel to provide young men for the five unmarried Bennet girls to dance with; they bring with them an atmosphere that is highly politically charged; they trail clouds of danger—images of a rebellious populace, of government repression, and, more distant but insistent nevertheless, of the fear of what might happen if the men in the militia, the troops, mutiny."
    So, are we supposed to feel uneasy about the militia in Pride and Prejudice?....

    Austen had an irrepressible sense of humour and it might as well be Jane Austen speaking to us directly when her beloved creation Elizabeth Bennet says, “Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.”  We talk about the crudity of our times--or at least, my times, with our gross-out comedies like American Pie--but you can’t beat the Georgians for cruel humour, and Austen was born a Georgian. She laughed about tragic things like miscarriages and a fat woman mourning the death of her son. Both Elizabeth Bennet and Mary Crawford make wisecracks about an older son dying so his younger brother can inherit.
   In an earlier blog series, I critiqued the book, Jane Austen: the Secret Radical. To recap here, Dr. Helena Kelly, while acknowledging that Austen is sometimes comic, argues she is altogether more serious and critical than people realize. The reason people don't realize this is because Austen had to hide her criticisms of society because she lived "in a state that was essentially totalitarian." Kelly says Jane Austen was a writer who wanted to write seriously, critically, about injustice and women's rights, and the corruption of the state and church, but had to hide her message. Austen was really a secret radical.

  In this blog series, I’m going to review some of the implicit values in Austen's novels. For example, it is Austen’s conviction that emotions should be kept under control. Personal morality, and not larger social issues, are the explicit themes of Austen's novels.
  First though, I'll start with what might appear to an irrelevant diversion. But it’s important because it undergirds everything I’ll be saying about Austen and her times.
   When discussing (or condemning) the attitudes and actions of people who lived two hundred years ago, there is one crucially important thing to keep in mind, and it is summed up in this chart which shows global gross domestic product from 0 BCE to the present day.
  ​Before the industrial revolution, as economist Carl Benedikt Frey explains, "For the majority of the English as late as 1813, conditions were no better than for their naked ancestors of the African savannah. The Darcys were few, the poor plentiful."
       But GDP leaped up like a rocket with the advent of industrialization...